The Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) and The Linux Foundation recently announced the launch of an ambitious project to re-engineer and re-architect the vast web of local, automated central offices (COs) that provide broadband access to consumers, businesses and government throughout the nation.
Dubbed CORD, for Central Office Re-architected, Google hosted the inaugural CORD Summit at the Sunnyvale Tech Corner Campus in Silicon Valley July 29th, which brought together representatives from across the open source software community.
Telco/ISPs were well represented. Representatives from AT&T, Verizon and China Unicom numbered among the attendees. Others from a range of Internet networking companies participated as well, including from Ciena, Google, NEC, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and the University of Arizona, as well as ON.Lab and The Linux Foundation.
Linux.com’s Greg Whelan explains why CORD is so important, and how it will change the economics of broadband in a recent blog post.
The Biggest Innovation since ADSL and the Cable Modem
Whelan touts CORD as the most significant innovation in the access market since ADSL and the cable modem. CORD, he writes, ¨has the potential to redefine the economics of access.¨
CORD’s focal point is the local central office, or CO, and specifically the last mile connectivity function of the CO, routing data traffic originating from or terminating in local homes, businesses and government offices to larger Tier 1 network POPs and the Internet core.
The aim is to re-engineer and re-architect the ungainly mix of broadband access equipment in local COs to be more in line with what you find in cloud data centers. Data centers have generated rapid growth in network demand and helped spur innovations that have resulted in significant gains in processing and distribution capacity while reducing electric power demands.
Getting there will be quite the challenge, however, Whelan points out. Local COs provide the last mile connectivity that enables broadband carriers to deliver services and data to end users. Industry participants have been working on this issue for decades, making improvements incrementally as technology advances.
Power Reduction is Key Goal
The largest modern data centers can consume hundreds of megawatts (MW) of electrical power, Whelan notes. Service providers individually tend to have of such scale. Comcast has three, according to Whelan.
The largest COs, in turn, provide network access for perhaps the 50 largest U.S. cities. Medium-sized COs cover maybe a few hundred more, while some 20,000 local COs are connection hubs with lines running out tens of thousands of customer premise endpoints. AT&T, according to Whelan, owns 4,700 local COs, many of which are wholly automated and operated remotely, except when physical equipment has to be repaired or replaced.